Pagans to the left of me! Pagans to the right!
Here we are nearly through the Summer fête season, and I haven’t posted about any of our entertainments. I suppose when you’ve described one brass band and table full of knick knacks, you’ve pretty much told the story.
Here’s something new to me, though — we bought a corn dolly at the last one.
“Corn” here means wheat, oats, rye or barley — whatever your staple carb crop may be — and not just maize. Maize being the thing-on-the-cob we call corn.
Except for tuna and sweetcorn, which is indeed tuna salad with corn kernels in. Which is like…yeah. It’s like that.
God, being a immigrant is confusing.
Anyhoo, a corn dolly is a little sculpture plaited out of straw, either as a love token at harvest time, or a receptacle to hold the spirit of the grain until she can be ploughed back into the earth in Spring.
Children of the Corn. Rosemary’s Baby. Wicker Man. Can I just trust y’all to come up with your own pop culture film reference for the place where I am currently at?
Thank you.
July 26, 2010 — 11:02 pm
Comments: 24
Civilization versus Islam
You know that famous satellite shot of the Korean Peninsula, where South Korea is lit up like a Chlistmas Tree, and North Korea is pitch brack? The difference between communism and capitalism — oh, how we laughed!
Well, I Googled up a night shot of the Middle East, looking for the same dealio (the lines and the land masses don’t exactly match because one is a satellite photo — earth curvature and all — and the other is a map I superimposed). And there it is. There are pools of light around a few cities in the Middle East, but the only place lit up end to end, like a proper Western nation, is Israel.
Behold the difference between Islam and anyplace you might want to be.
What got me thinking was Doc Zero’s excellent piece today on anti-Civilization. Read it; it’s good. His conclusion is something I have been thinking for a while.
I used to believe if Iran or somebody lobbed a nuke at Israel, then the lefties would be sorry. I don’t think that any more. I bet the reaction would be something more like, “oh, it’s horrible — horrible! What a tragedy. But, really — putting a Jewish nation there was never going to work, was it? And I hate to speak ill of the dead, what with the smoke still rising out of Tel Aviv Crater, but the way Israel behaved. I wouldn’t dare say they brought it on themselves, but…”
Makes me feel sick.
Remember, Dead Pool tomorrow. When the timestamp on this blog says 6pm, which is GMT I think, but if I screw that up again, steve will probably come to my house and beat me to death with my own spotted dick.
June 3, 2010 — 10:14 pm
Comments: 29
…just three more years…
I’d like to hang this illustration over an insightful post about how our current boy president seems to go WAY out of his way to flatter our darkest enemies and endanger our oldest friends. But the truth of the matter is, I just got the old poster mashed up in my head with Bibi Netanyahu and the only way to exorcise a mental image is to draw it.
Most of my picture ideas are because the insulation on my brainal wires isn’t very good.
Edit to add: happy Passover, y’all!
March 29, 2010 — 8:54 pm
Comments: 30
Machs grün!
Oh, now this is rich. German greenies calculate that a blog which gets 15,000 hits or more a month (yay! we qualify!) pumps out 8 pounds of carbon dioxide a year.
So what you’re supposed to do is, you write a blog post about this, you put a link to them in the sidebar using their “my blog is carbon neutral” graphic, they plant a tree in your name, it soaks up 11 pounds of CO2, and — violoncello! — your blog IS carbon neutral.
So let’s point out the utterly fucking obvious, shall we? There is no relationship between blogs and trees. Nobody is waiting around for a pingback before they go stick a spruce in the ground. This is an ongoing reforestation program (by the Arbor Day Foundation in the Plumas National Forest. In California) and these German greenie-weenies have just latched onto to display, once again, their weak (or dishonest) grasp of cause-and-effect.
The trees will be planted regardless.
Do you know, China is set to pass the US this year as the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide? I say, let’s get on board that campaign! For every blog displaying a colorful “my blog belches carbon” icon (small sidebar version here, pointlessly large version here), China will build another inefficient coal-fired electricity plant or smoke-belching industrial smokestack. Why, your humble blog could be responsible for spewing thousands of extra tons of carbon dioxide (along with unknown quantities of other, real pollutants) into the atmosphere every year!
Okay, not really, but it makes as much sense as that Green bullshit.
UPDATE: whoa! Small Dead Animals ‘lanche! That’s one of Weasel’s favoritest blogs. Y’all be sure to come back Friday for the Dead Pool. Everyone’s welcome — and you might be the lucky winner of Aunty’s Spotted Dick!
March 11, 2010 — 10:12 pm
Comments: 44
Dressing for the unserious
Did you see this? A group of Palestinians — during their regularly scheduled weekly protest, no less — paraded around dressed up like those blue things from Avatar. In some of the images, they had the little tails and pointy ears and bows ‘n’ arrows and everything.
Tools.
Does this mean they watch 3D blockbusters in the camps? Or is there some Rachel Corrie type Westerner in the background telling them, “paint yourselves blue and you’ll, like, totally pwn!”
Or, taking this to the logical conclusion, are they waiting for a sympathetic Jew to come along and lead them to victory against Israel?
February 22, 2010 — 6:31 pm
Comments: 11
Well, that’s weird
I was on the phone to my old man the other day, reminiscing about the time he shot a huge rat in the family hunting cabin and all the little rats went screaming insane around us for a day. I had it in my head that a master rat was known as a rat king, but it turns out these are rat kings — a bunch of rats that somehow get tangled at the tails and live out their days as a big traveling clump o’ rats.
First reported in 1564, they may or may not be for real — despite several found in museums and sightings well into the 20th C. The Rucphen rat king (above) shows what looks like damage and healing of the knotted tail bones on x-ray, so if it’s a fake, it’s a clever one.
Surviving rat kings are made up of black rats, Rattus rattus, which have been almost completely displaced in Europe by the brown rat, Rattus norvegicus. So that explains why there aren’t any more. That, or because the whole thing was bullshit.
Rat kings were believed to bring plague — which I suppose they could do as well as any other kind of rat.
Have some Alta Vista translations: the Dutch rat king a Rutphen, the German rat king of Altenburger and the French rat king of Nantes.
Now, does anybody know what a rat patriarch is called?
February 3, 2010 — 7:48 pm
Comments: 20
So how about this: increased scrutiny for goofy-looking loserboys?
I mean, Jesus — look at these two! Wouldn’t you get up and move if Richard Reid sat next to you on a bus? To be perfectly fair to Abdulmutallabambalambabooboo, it’s the angle makes him look so goofy. Maybe that’s the photographer’s fault. Or maybe he really was gazing into the camera cocked sideways like a doberman staring down a kazoo.
Okay, fine. If they don’t want to profile Muslims — or, god forbid, foreign brown people — can we please profile young men with an obvious screw loose?
I got pulled out of line once, just as I was boarding a flight to London. I think it was my new aviator sunglasses (it was six in the morning, but I’d been up all night shuffling around Logan airport). Anyhow, I took them off and chatted with the nice security man for a while, showed him my passport and he let me on the plane.
Me. Middle-aged middle-class middle-American Wonder-bread old broad, me.
Is there any doubt if they’d pulled either of these guys out of line for a chat, he’d’ve rattled to pieces on the spot? Why didn’t they? Is there something like an inalienable right to be young, male and loser-y?
Okay, I take the point that the bad guys would go all out trying to recruit bombers who don’t fit the profile. But judging from these guys, they’re having a hell of a time recruiting the usual splodey-dopes who fit the profile exactly. What’re the odds they could convince a blue-eyed Scandihoovian grandma to slip into a panty bomb?
December 29, 2009 — 8:56 pm
Comments: 21
Captions?
Hmmm. I don’t know. My best so far is:
Only YOU can prevent Muslim crotch fires!
December 28, 2009 — 5:48 pm
Comments: 64
Those barbaric bastards!!!
I took French in High School. I didn’t want to. I wanted to take Latin or, failing that, maybe German or something. But I had to take a language, and French was the only class with open seats. I ended up actually enjoying the reading and writing part (and being pretty good at it) but sucking royally at speaking. I gots the performance anxiety.
Anyway, that’s neither ici nor là-bas. Point is, somehow, I never mentally translated Alouette until Uncle B brought it up yesterday.
Dude. It’s about skinning skylarks! Those lovely little songbirds! Wikipedia says the song is French Canuckian, where they used to eat skylarks. Check it out:
Little skylark, lovely little skylark
Little lark, I will pluck your feathers off
I’ll pluck the feathers off your head
I’ll pluck the feathers off your head
Off your head – off your head
Little lark, little lark
O-o-o-o-oh
Then they go on to pluck Off your beak, Off your neck, Off your wings, Off your back, Off your legs and Off your tail. Jesus ke-rist, you people!
Eh. The pomme doesn’t fall far from the pommier. The old Ripley’s Believe it or Not Show — the one with Jack Palance, which really should have been called “Believe It Or Not, Foreigners Eat Some Really Weird Shit” — did a whole segment on ortolan prepared and eaten in the traditional French manner.
Bon appetit!
December 16, 2009 — 8:18 pm
Comments: 28
It’s crashing. It’s crashing terrible. Oh, the huge vanity…!
I. CAN. NOT. BE-LIEVE that our greenhorn president really, genuinely went to Copenhagen to lobby for Chicago to get the Olympics. Like others, I assumed he had it in the bag before flying out to accept the honor (which was tacky enough, but just inside the bounds). To prostrate THE OFFICE OF MY COUNTRY’S PRESIDENT before the international gang of midget wrestlers that is the Olympic Committee, and to do it ON SPEC?! AND FAIL?!
Oh, I am sorely vexed. I’m not sure the heady pleasure of watching him crash and burn can make up for the hot ouchy of the international humiliation. Can somebody fax this bozo a copy of the job description, please?
There ought to be some kind of Internet Snark Award for the wag at Drudge who came up with the headline The Ego Has Landed.
EDIT: changed ‘humanity’ to ‘huge vanity.’ Thenk yew, lauraw.
October 2, 2009 — 2:03 pm
Comments: 41